Halo 3 hype is justified

As today goes on, the crowds at the corner of Bay and Dundas Sts. will grow thicker and more excited. By midnight, when the downtown Best Buy store begins selling copies of Halo 3, the hordes will be ready to burst.

Price: $69.99 (or $79.99 in a nicer box, or $149.99 in a really nice box with DVDs full of video extras and a toy helmet)

As today goes on, the crowds at the corner of Bay and Dundas Sts. will grow thicker and more excited. By midnight, when the downtown Best Buy store begins selling copies of Halo 3, the hordes will be ready to burst.

People will be peeling off shrink-wraps on the sidewalk, they will be so excited. Even if you have nothing to put it in, holding a shiny disc and staring at it can still be a satisfying thing if the mood is right.

Expect the mood to be right. Tonight's launch will serve as a cap to the Gaming Invasion '07 event, a flurry of joystickery which took over Yonge-Dundas Square all weekend, offering the eager public its first chance to play the multiplayer portion of the new Halo 3.

Frenzied launches are getting to be old hat for the Halo series. When Halo 2 was released in the late fall 2004, it managed $125 million in sales within a day of its arrival in stores and set off an explosion of public-relations boasting that is still rattling windows three years later. Halo 2 was no mere video game; it redefined the way the world thought about entertainment. Apparently our thinking is about to be re-redefined.

The good news is that Halo 3 is terrific fun. But first, a note about those sales dollars. In the U.S. Halo 3 is retailing for $59.99, Sadly, the discs available in stores up here still cost nearly ten bucks more.Apparently overcharging makes it easier to re-define the way we think about entertainment.

Okay, now the fun. Like the first two games in the series, Halo 3 is a first-person shooter set several hundred years in the future. Humanity travels the stars, meeting aliens and negotiating with them and occasionally getting into wars. It is a lot like Star Trek, only with more cigars and less utopianism. The hero is a space marine with no name, referred to only by his rank, Master Chief. He wears an electric armour suit of that can protect him from nearly any peril (as the game begins, he has just survived a 2-kilometre fall), and he carries big, futuristic machine guns.

We play as the Chief. Our job is to wander through forests, hangars, spaceships and tunnels with our big machine gun out and to shoot and kill any crazed aliens who attack. Sometimes we have a little puzzle to solve and sometimes we get lost and have to find our way out of a hostile environment, but mostly the game is about shooting. It is not about a new kind of shooting and neither is it very different from the shooting that made the first two Halos so popular. But it is fun. Holy cow, is it fun.

Getting to play a game like Halo 3 before its release is an exercise in legal formalities. You have to sign a document promising not to tell anyone anything until an embargo date passes and you have to agree not to reveal any of several key plot points. This is kind of puzzling. The plot of Halo is generic sci-fi hokum. The aliens are crazed and gooey and must be shot. The Chief is strong and silent. The commanding officer is gruff but has a good heart. None of this has anything to do with why the game is great.

The game is great because filling an alien's skull with space lead is an articulately spiced mix of difficulty and familiarity. It doles out the rewards and the punishments in perfect balance. And the moment we stop playing we get itchy to pick up the controller again. It haunts us.

One quibble: if the Master Chief can fall two kilometres without hurting himself, why does he die every time he gets run over by a Jeep?

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